On The Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness Hardcover – April 12, 2005
by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew 
 
"A tremendously authentic and beautifully written book!" --Paulette Bates Alden, author of Crossing the Moon
 
For readers of Kathleen Norris and Annie Dillard, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew's On The Threshold is an intimate and unabashed portrait of the spiritual life. Drawing from the physical and spiritual terrain that she has inhabited throughout her life--predominantly around her home in Minneapolis, MN--the author leads the reader on the quest to feel at home with one's self and one's beliefs.

With honesty, subtlety, and none of the spiritual platitudes that encumber many faith narratives, Andrew's meditations turn to the details of household maintenance--the cluttered pantry, the loose-screened porch, the dim bedroom--and neighborly relations to examine the sometimes empty, sometimes exuberant seasons of the spiritual life.  Occasionally whimsical, sometimes awed, always probing, these reflections model for us the possibility of leading a contemplative life in contemporary society.
 
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A New Yorker by birth, Andrew moved to Minnesota in her 20s, eventually buying a friend's white bungalow in south Minneapolis. The house—with its peeling screen door; conservative neighbor, Evelyn; and checkerboard-style, claw-footed bathtub with red painted toenails—quickly became a source of reflection and the subject of many of the 38 essays in this collection: "This is my spiritual discipline, this reading of my house for heart and meaning." For Andrew—author of Writing the Sacred Journey and Swinging on the Garden Gate, a memoir about being bisexual and Christian—the physical universe is a springboard into spiritual realities: "Irrevocable, indisputable experience continues to unleash mysteries." Foundations and basements lead to "engagement with the mystery lurking at the root of all things." Falling chunks of plaster hint that "by tending the temporary, we touch what's eternal." Dad brings his tools to fix the front porch, and "we work on a house that... is really the soul we, side by side, are learning to tend." Beyond the bungalow, she swims in a northern Minnesota lake, worships in a church at the base of the Witch's Hat water tower, listens to whistling trains and finds love. Adroitly interweaving story, description and reflection, these introspective essays will appeal to those who savor language and recognize the sacred at the heart of everyday experience. (Apr. 12)
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From Booklist
Andrew makes clear from the start that she is no holier-than-thou ascetic. She is too earthbound, too much in love with the flesh-and-blood of everyday life. And yet she admires, with deep affection, Christianity and the Christian tradition. Jesus has become a model for her, and she does her best to emulate him in her work as a freelance writing teacher and spiritual director. But she hasn't much patience for the shortcomings of the institutional church. What interests her is the Christian story, and she attempts to make sense of a chaotic world through the medium of story. Raised a Methodist in upstate New York, she moved to Minneapolis when 18. Fifteen years later, she is still there, stoking a sense of community within a circle of writers, liberal theologians, and others. Modest in the best sense of the world, her book affords a nuts-and-bolts look at the spiritual life and a meditation on what it means to be human and to live a faith-based existence in an increasingly inhospitable, messy world. June Sawyers
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